Hansen’s disease, also called leprosy, is treatable today – and that’s partly due to a curious tree and the work of a pioneering young scientist within the Twenties. Centuries prior to her discovery, victims had no treatment for leprosy’s debilitating symptoms or its social stigma.
This young scientist, Alice Balllaid fundamental groundwork for the primary effective leprosy treatment globally. But her legacy still prompts conversations in regards to the marginalization of ladies and other people of color in science today.
As a bioethicist and historian of drugsI’ve studied Ball’s contributions to medicine, and I’m pleased to see her receive increasing recognition for her work, especially on a disease that is still stigmatized.
Who was Alice Ball?
Alice Augusta Ball, born in Seattle, Washington, in 1892, became the first woman and first African American to earn a master’s degree in science from the College of Hawaii in 1915, after completing her studies in pharmaceutical chemistry the yr prior.
After she finished her master’s degree, the faculty hired her as a research chemist and instructor, and he or she became the primary African American with that title within the chemistry department.
Impressed by her master’s thesis on the chemistry of the kava plantDr. Harry Hollmann with the Leprosy Investigation Station of the U.S. Public Health Service in Hawaii recruited Ball. At the time, leprosy was a significant public health issue in Hawaii.
Doctors now understand that leprosy, also called Hansen’s disease, is minimally contagious. But in 1865, the fear and stigma related to leprosy led authorities in Hawaii to implement a compulsory segregation policy, which ultimately isolated those with the disease on a distant peninsula on the island of Molokai. In 1910, over 600 leprosy victims were living in Molokai.
This policy overwhelmingly affected Native Hawaiians, who accounted for over 90% of all those exiled to Molokai.
The significance of chaulmoogra oil
Doctors had attempted to make use of nearly every treatment conceivable to treat leprosy, even experimenting with dangerous substances comparable to arsenic and strychnine. But the lone consistently effective treatment was chaulmoogra oil.
Chaulmoogra oil is derived from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree. Health practitioners in India and Burma had been using this oil for hundreds of years as a treatment for various skin diseases. But there have been limitations with the treatment, and it had only marginal effects on leprosy.
The oil could be very thick and sticky, which makes it hard to rub into the skin. The drug can also be notoriously bitter, and patients who ingested it could often start vomiting. Some physicians experimented with injections of the oil, but this produced painful pustules.
George McGlashan Kerr, CC BY
The Ball Method
If researchers could harness chaulmoogra’s curative potential without the nasty uncomfortable side effects, the tree’s seeds could revolutionize leprosy treatment. So, Hollmann turned to Ball. In a 1922 articleHollmann documents how the 23-year-old Ball discovered find out how to chemically adapt chaulmoogra into an injection that had not one of the uncomfortable side effects.
The Ball Method, as Hollmann called her discovery, transformed chaulmoogra oil into essentially the most effective treatment for leprosy until the introduction of sulfones within the late Forties.
In 1920, the Ball Method successfully treated 78 patients in Honolulu. A yr later, it treated 94 more, with the Public Health Service noting that the morale of all of the patients drastically improved. For the primary time, there was hope for a cure.
Tragically, Ball didn’t have the chance to enjoy this achievementas she passed away inside a yr at only 24, likely from exposure to chlorine gas within the lab.
Ball’s legacy, lost and located
Ball’s death meant she didn’t have the chance to publish her research. Arthur Dean, chair of the College of Hawaii’s chemistry department, took over the project.
Dean mass-produced the treatment and published a series of articles on chaulmoogra oil. He renamed Ball’s method the “Dean Method,” and he never credited Ball for her work.
Ball’s other colleagues did try to protect Ball’s legacy. A 1920 article within the Journal of the American Medical Association praises the Ball Method, while Hollmann clearly credits Ball in his own 1922 article.
Ball is described at length in a 1922 article in volume 15, issue 5of Current History, an instructional publication on international affairs. That feature is excerpted in a June 1941 issue of Carter G. Woodson’s “Negro History Bulletin,” referring to Ball’s achievement and premature death.
Joseph Duttona well-regarded religious volunteer on the leprosy settlements on Molokai, further referenced Ball’s work in a 1932 memoir broadly published for a preferred audience.
Historians comparable to Paul Wermager later prompted a contemporary reckoning with Ball’s poor treatment by Dean and others, ensuring that Ball received proper credit for her work. Following Wermager’s and others’ work, the University of Hawaii honored Ball in 2000 with a bronze plaqueaffixed to the last remaining chaulmoogra tree on campus.
In 2019, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine added Ball’s name to the surface of its constructing. Ball’s story was even featured in a 2020 short film, “The Ball Method.”
The Ball Method represents each a scientific achievement and a history of marginalization. A young woman of color pioneered a medical treatment for a highly stigmatizing disease that disproportionately affected an already disenfranchised Indigenous population.
In 2022, then-Gov. David Ige declared Feb. 28 Alice Augusta Ball Day in Hawaii. It was only fitting that the ceremony took place on the Mānoa campus within the shade of the chaulmoogra tree.
